Aza Raskin: Your life: brought to you by Budweiser

This article was taken from the June 2011 issue of Wired
magazine. Be the first to read Wired's articles in print before
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Your past actions are the best predictor of your future
decisions. That's why data about your buying decisions and
demographic is so valuable: it enables companies to know what and
when you'll buy. Marketing has focused on influencing your future
decisions because changing your past actions, or the memory of
them, has seemed impossible. You can't change the past. That's no
longer true. Marketers now have the technology to meddle with your
memories. To find out how, let's first step back to old-school
product placement.

Dr Pepper comes to mind when I hear the word " Spider-Man". In the film, as Peter Parker learns to use his
powers, he spies a can of Dr Pepper across the room and, after a
few tries, gets to enjoy drinking the cold beverage that had been
out of reach. Mass-media product
placement of this kind works by association and memory. But
this is a last-century technique. The goods and services famous
people consume will continue to wriggle into our subconscious, but
increasingly we live in a world where there isn't one source of
truth. The internet has diversified our communication channels.
Narrowcasting is replacing broadcasting; our friends are replacing
celebrities.

In this new world of narrowcasting, product placement is about
to get uncomfortably personal. This is how it is going to happen:
each of our worlds is the sum of our experiences. Our memories help
define who we are. We document and share that world through our status updates and photo albums. What we share creates the
documentary of our lives. The online presence of your friends and
family -- their e-autobiography -- is becoming your source of truth
about their lives. The value of the trust we place in our friends
and the ease with which our autobiographies can be modified will
not go unexploited.

The goal is digital revisionist history -- products injected
into our memories. Tweaking photos on Flickr and Facebook to
change the drink we are holding to a can of Budweiser, the
billboard in the background to Samsung's, your
friend's T-shirt to Abercrombie. It might be Facebook's next
billion-dollar business model. And it might not always be so inane
as infecting your buying habits -- it may include your political
views.

Cognitive psychology has shown that our memories are
predictably fallible -- reconstructed from bare-bone frameworks,
not remembered in high resolution. Psychologist Elizabeth Loftus
has proved that eyewitness reports are easily manipulated via the
"misinformation effect": leading questions or misleading
information can change critical details of memories. In studies,
Loftus and others found that after a single session they could
implant a detailed false memory into one in four people. In a
recent study at University of California Irvine, published in
Applied Cognitive Psychology, researchers were able to change
participants' understanding of famous events by showing them
doctored photos. Memory is easily reshaped.

As you look back at your photos from a year ago, you get the
subliminal message: "I did have a great time at that party and,
yes, I guess I was drinking Budweiser." Your memory has been
hijacked. If you don't consciously remember or don't know which
photos have been tampered with, the heist is flawless. Even if you
do remember, your friends probably won't know any different.
Budweiser has just exploited their trust in you. Next time they go
shopping, that little memory does its brand-affinity magic and
changes their behaviour.

But why would you let anyone manipulate your pictures and hijack
your memory? Perhaps a company might offer to touch up your
pictures -- remove spots, make you look thinner -- in exchange for
product placement. You get benefit, companies get value and you'll
rarely know which photos have had what added to them. Your memory,
your past, is now monetisable. You can generate value just from
having lived.

Our memories are still pristine, but not for long. We know that
the best predictor of our future decisions is our past actions.
With digital revisionist history, those past actions aren't
immutable and marketers will be writing our personal histories. The
question is: how can we stop it?

Aza Raskin's startup, MassiveHealth.com, aims to
start a design and big-data renaissance in medicine. Previously, he
was creative lead for Firefox